


The Secret Ingredient

by calico_fiction



Series: 3 Times Taako Cooked His Feelings +1 Time He Ate Them [4]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Comfort Food, Extended Metaphors, Found Family, Gen, Making Up, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28232829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calico_fiction/pseuds/calico_fiction
Summary: Taako remembers teaching this recipe to Lucretia. She didn't ask, and Taako can't remember now what made him do it, what made him pick her. It just felt right, at the time. He'd made her promise not to write it down. It was just for them, he'd said. Just for family.
Relationships: The Director | Lucretia & Taako
Series: 3 Times Taako Cooked His Feelings +1 Time He Ate Them [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1289960
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23





	The Secret Ingredient

**Author's Note:**

> I called the two-sun plane Tuscon because Tuscon is a real place that kind of sounds like two-sun and I thought it was funny. Please retroactively imagine all of my IPRE Crew as having Arizonian accents. :)
> 
> I listened to Native Tongue by Paramore on repeat while writing this, and it shows.

Taako doesn't even remember what he's doing on the moon in the middle of the night, has no idea what made up errand he'd sent himself on so that he could come up here and skulk around in the bittersweet memories, because when he swipes his fantasy key card and comes into the Horny Boys' dorm suite he's greeted by the smell of burning flour and the sting of smoke in his eyes. Someone is cooking badly in here.

Taako picks his way past the covered furniture towards the kitchen, saving his potential quips up to be deployed depending on who's in there. All of the lights are on above the breakfast bar, the counters messy, but whoever is in here is either wallowing in pity on the floor or dead because Taako can't see them. Finally, he comes around the corner and can behold the whole scene.

He recognizes the recipe before anything else, despite the travesty that has been made of it. Faerun doesn't have _exactly_ the same fruits and roots that Tuscon had, but Taako knows all of their closest equivalents by heart. It's a cake that's been attempted here. A very specific cake, one that Auntie used to make for Taako and Lup for their birthday and holidays, and sometimes when they were 'sick' and had to stay home from school. On the Starblaster, Taako and Lup had been sure to make it for each other at least once a cycle. Not on their birthday anymore, then, because birthdays had quickly lost all meaning, but for other things. If someone had died or someone had survived or someone got sick or got better or one of them made a friend or lost one, or if nothing in particular happened at all which in those days was the most special occasion of all.

Taako remembers, vividly, teaching the recipe to Lucretia. She didn't ask, and Taako can't remember now what made him do it, what made him pick her. It just felt right, at the time, he supposes, or maybe he'd meant it as a message. He'd made her promise not to write it down. It was just for them, he'd said. Just for family.

She's wallowing on the floor, just like he thought. Her robes are in shades of purple, her hair especially stark against her dark skin in the fantasy fluorescent overhead lights. Her face is hidden in her hands, but Taako isn't so foolish as to think she hasn't noticed him come in. He doesn't press her for attention though (none of his brilliant zingers had been for her anyway). Instead, he takes in more of the disaster around her. There are ingredients absolutely everywhere, and half full mixing bowls of discarded batter, lumpy or melting or burnt to shit mistake cakes, pans that look greased but otherwise unused, pans that look completely untouched.

And there, in the oven, a pan of batter that's just been put in.

"I just thought I'd- try," Lucretia says haltingly from between her hands. She's crying. She's not making any tearful noises or breathing unevenly, her shoulders don't shake, and Taako can't see her face, but he knows she's crying. He'll always know, even if he wants to forget (he doesn't want to forget; he never wants to forget anything, ever again).

(He doesn't want to forget this, about her, specifically. He would be - is - a different person without her, just like he was - is - a different person without having had Lup at his side all his life.)

"What," Taako asks, flat, careful. He doesn't know how he feels.

No, that's not true. He knows how he feels; it's just that there's so much of it. He feels robbed, like she's a thief to have kept this thing he gave her when he couldn't remember giving it. He feels guilty that she remembered when he didn't even though that wasn't in his control. He feels fucking grief stricken: he misses her.

(He misses himself, the original and the false. This new thing he has to be now, this amalgam of pasts that can't coexist but do anyway... It's so much more complicated than either were separately.)

Lucretia turns her head away to wipe her cheeks free of visible tears and Taako of course pretends not to notice. It's undignified to wipe away tears, unless they're the graceful, picturesque tears of a delicate debutant made emotional by a sudden change in wealth or love. When she looks up at him it's with confusion.

"We both know food isn't just food," Taako clarifies impatiently. "Not for us." He wants 'us' to mean just him and Lup, but it doesn't. Not quite.

"No," Lucretia agrees softly. "No, not for us." She looks to the batter in the oven with a sigh. "I was trying to show you- I was trying to prove-" She sighs again, a gust heavy enough to send up a little sprinkle of flour from her robes. "Well if I can't even manage to say it in my language, I can't imagine why I thought I could do it in yours." She stands then, and gives Taako a short, professional nod, and as she moves past him towards the doorway Taako realizes - she's giving up. Taako can't begin to guess, right now, if that's what he wants. She pauses in the doorway, waiting - hoping, probably - but he doesn't call her back. She leaves him, and he lets her.

Taako peers in at the cake that's baking. From outside the oven it looks right. The batter is subtly lumpy, not overblended but not unmixed, still shiny-wet in the baking light. It'll be twenty minutes at least before the toothpick test is even to be considered.

Taako turns away from the oven and stands straight with hands on hips to survey Lucretia's damage. No sense in leaving an otherwise perfectly serviceable kitchen like this. You never know when you might be on the moon and need to whip up an emergency quiche. So he cleans up. He washes the dishes first, because that in itself is messy too. He puts away the ingredients - the all-purpose flour that was opened but never used, the cake flour that is now less than half of what Taako had left it last.

Taako licks his fingertip clean of each of the abandoned batters before he scrapes them - this one with too little salt, this one too much. He plucks off dainty tasting bites of each discarded cake before wrangling them out of their tins - this one with pockets of raw flour, this one with two whole eggs instead of one and a yolk. Each tells Taako one sentence more of a story he can't make himself stop reading even though he already knows the ending.

The cake in the oven smells right. Ten more minutes, surely. Eight at least.

Taako scrubs down the counters, the handles on the fridge, on the oven, the cabinets. This kitchen is arranged precisely as he would have made it himself. This kitchen was made for him.

This kitchen, with its cake in the oven, was made for him. Not for any other purpose but to be given to him. Just to be one mundane little thing in Taako's life that is _sweet_.

The toothpick comes out clean.

The oven mitts that came with the kitchen - the mitts that Taako had stolen from the University's gift shop as he was leaving after his application interview because he'd thought they would remove him from consideration once they'd met him - are ready and waiting on top of the stove. They're soft and warm on Taako's hands, barely used. Pilfered, and then given. Like so much else.

The bottom of the cake sticks a little to the pan, but not terribly. It's the kind of snag that only takes a little frosting to fix. Of course, 'Creesh didn't make any frosting, but that's what she has Taako for- No. Not really. Not like before. Taako leaves the cake with its imperfections, its little leopard spot divots. The parts that Lucretia and Taako both couldn't quite make right.

Taako cuts a piece of cake for himself. It plates without falling apart, looks evenly baked in the center. He eats it with his hands like a slice of pizza.

Taako doesn't cry. Not for real. He is not actually a delicate debutant, see, so his tears are just tears. No grace or beauty about them. So Taako just plain does not cry, not if he can avoid it. And if he can't, you can bet he'll find an excuse. Onions or something. Dust. It's a silly maladaptive thing born of a childhood in which any perceived weakness was just as dangerous as a real one, and the hard learned lesson that anything can be perceived as a weakness if someone is looking. Taako just hasn't bothered to grow out of it yet. Maybe he never will, or maybe he'll be totally over it tomorrow.

There aren't any onions in this kitchen, or dust either. But no one is looking, so Taako cries.

The cake isn't perfect. It doesn't taste like it would if Taako had made it, or if Lup had. It tastes like cake that Lucretia made from a recipe Taako gave her some fraction of a century ago that she held onto with her mind alone just so that she could try, now, to give it back to him.

Taako eats almost the whole cake, and cries. When the cake is decimated before him and his eyes refuse to give up any more moisture, Taako leans heavy on the counter and breathes slow and deep. The air feels fresh and new in his mouth now that the oven has cooled. The kitchen and Taako are no longer in the state of baking, but rather the state of just having baked.

Taako stares down at the last piece of cake, struggling to decide what to do with it, until his face dries. There's crusty snot from the hard cry drying and itching on his upper lip; the perfect excuse for a moment more of stalling. Warm water on a microfiber washcloth, on the whole of his face, until all of the evidence can be gently wiped away without leaving any tell-tale redness behind. The cake, inanimate, waits with unimpeachable patience.

The last slice of cake plates without falling apart. Taako forces a laugh at the irony (even if his tear ducts weren't still on strike, he _just_ wiped his face). Taako has eyes only for the cake as he makes his way out of the dorm and across the moon's campus. He doesn't know if he passes anyone on the way, and he doesn't want to. He doesn't knock at Lucretia's imposing door, doesn't even look up, just pushes his way in.

Lucretia doesn't gasp - this decades older Lucretia plain doesn't do it - but Taako's sensitive ears pick up the hitch in her breath when she sees him.

"Taako," she says, carefully neutral. He doesn't know how to respond so he doesn't respond at all, and she doesn't say anything else. Taako approaches the desk with the same single-minded focus on the destination that he utilized to get this far.

"This one got close." Taako has to look away from the cake at last so that he can drop the plate onto Lucretia's desk as if he doesn't care what happens to it, if she gets to eat any of it or not. Her office is dim, a single lamp lit in a corner, leaving long dark shadows to stain everything purple including Lucretia herself. Her hair could be grey or it could be lilac, depending on what Taako wants to see.

"Oh," she says. She stares up at him, hasn't so much as glanced at her cake. "I- Thank you, Taako." Taako isn't sure he wants her gratitude, or to tell her she's welcome to him - even if she is. He gives a noncommittal hum, acknowledgement that he heard her and nothing more.

"Could be leagues better," Taako adds. "But- I mean, you got all the ingredients right. That's what really counts. In a cake." Lucretia nods solemnly. She doesn't smile. She looks like she's not sure if she's allowed yet. Taako doesn't know either, but it's a lot less terrifying to take a wild guess with some company.

So Taako pulls out a chair and he sits with Lucretia in the dark. He watches her eat her cake and cry, for him. Just for him.

"You should have asked me for help," Taako murmurs when the clink of Lucretia's fork on her plate has long faded into silence and she has wiped away her ungraceful, ugly tears.

"I know," Lucretia agrees thickly. She drags the back of her hand underneath her nose with a disgustingly wet sniff. Taako grimaces, but accepts Lucretia's weaknesses as they come. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away - if Taako hadn't already known that he sure would have learned it after all of this. Lucretia takes a breath to speak again - to _apologize_ again, no doubt. But Taako finds that he doesn't need her self-flagellation anymore, if he ever really did, and he doesn't want either one of them to suffer through it just for spite.

"Everyone starts out as a fuckup," he declares, breezing right over her before she can even start. He stands, ready to book it out of here as soon as he hands this piece over. "Not Taako, of course, ch'boi was born like this. But." He pauses, not on purpose exactly. But. "You know what I mean." It's not a question, but Lucretia knows the answer anyway.

"Yeah, Taako," she says, and smiles. "I know what you mean."


End file.
